A dog made the discovery of a lifetime when it discovered an animal believed to be extinct after it wasn’t seen for nearly 90 years.
The collie had been deployed by the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT) as a scent detection dog in a yearslong and nearly hopeless pursuit of finding traces of the De Winton’s golden mole. This shimmering mole rarely appears above ground and was last seen in 1936.
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The blind moles live almost entirely underground and don’t leave behind tunnels like other species of moles. They appear to “swim” through the sand, according to a press release from EWT, and their extremely sensitive hearing alerts them to vibrations above ground, allowing them to burrow into the ground without being seen.
The idea of training a dog to look for an animal that might be extinct is wild.
How do you give it a scent of what to find? Seems like you’d have to train it to look for something unusual or similar to an existing scent but that is pretty ambitious and difficult to explain to a dog
Maybe preserved specimens?
I did wonder about this and I’d assume Victorian naturalists bagged a few that are still around but they probably smell more of formaldehyde and pipe smoke (a bit like the Victorian naturalists) but dogs are very well-atuned to smells, so that might not be an issue. It’s more likely that they used a related species which would likely be close enough. How they caught one after sniffing it out is probably another tale again.